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Jan. 6, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:21
45 Random Drives Through Tangent City

Even for me, this one is pretty tangential! Some good stuff about modern art though...

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
It is Friday, December the 6th, and I'm heading off to work.
8.39 in the morning.
I've got to tell you, it's kind of funny living in Canada.
Canada, the exquisitely chilly and grim, you know, like the winter here is kind of grim.
It's a lot of fun when you're a kid, but not so much when you're an adult.
I used to ski quite a bit, but My wife has a sort of Mediterranean aversion to the cold, and so I can't really do that as much anymore.
But this morning, I got up and I went out into the hallway, and there was this big light streaming in from the bathroom.
And I thought, did I leave the bathroom light on last night?
I couldn't figure it out.
And it finally struck me that it was actually sunlight.
It was actually sunlight.
I couldn't figure out why it was so bright as we have a skylight in the landing.
And it's very strange to not recognize sunlight in your own house.
But that's the magical world of Canada.
And so if you ever get a chance to visit here, do it in the summer.
And if you live in a warm climate and know of anybody who wants a highly experienced and highly skilled software entrepreneurial manager guy, you be sure to give me a toodle, okay?
That's the deal.
That's all you have to pay for.
It's to get me out of this fridge.
It is funny in life, sort of how some place as important as where you live is accidental, right?
I mean, you don't choose it.
I mean, because if you did, I mean, who on earth would ever choose to live in Canada?
I mean, what a lunatic place to come to live.
So my wife and I have sort of been talking about that and saying, well, you know, we really don't have much to do with our families anymore.
We have a few close friends but, you know, that's not a reason to stay in a particular place.
And I don't get to spend enough time around Christians.
That's really what I think.
So we're thinking of moving to the States.
But, you know, the trick is to find someplace warm where we can afford it and where people are willing to sponsor the onerous process of moving and getting the legal ability to work in the States.
It's always sort of struck me as funny, just before we get to the main topic today.
We do have one, really.
Really, I promise.
Before we get to the main topic today, which is voting, I just sort of wanted to mention, and we'll do another one on immigration at some point, but I've always sort of found it funny that a group of people get to a country and then they sort of establish a culture or civilization there.
And then, you know, as soon as they're They don't have any kind of money at all.
They sort of raised the drawbridge and are now completely against immigration.
And of course the immigration, the hostility towards immigration is a direct result of the welfare state and free services provided by government.
Nobody is going to have boo to say about immigration unless they feel that their own paychecks are being threatened by people scamming them for state services, i.e.
receiving services and not paying taxes.
And so, you know, the death spiral sets in, wherein, because people are getting services, scamming services, and not paying as much in taxes, the taxes have to go up, which means that fewer people still want to pay the taxes, and there's more incentive to get the services for free, and so on.
So, that's, you know, we'll have another chat about that topic another time, but I've always thought that's kind of funny, and now that I'm facing a possible emigration to the US, I know how horrendous it can be to try and get any kind of legal status to work there.
A friend of mine who's a professor, he got a job at a university.
I think they had to advertise for two years for a professor with his particular skill set in order to be able to continue hiring him so he wasn't taking jobs away from Americans.
That kind of thinking, I just find, is so economically illiterate.
And I'm not saying... My friend is a good economist, I'm sure, and the people who were hiring him were economists, so they knew how silly it was.
It was just that they had to do that, or they wouldn't be able to hire him.
So, the topic this morning is voting.
We have an election coming up here in Canada, for a variety of reasons.
It's a relatively short election, One of it has to do with the fact that the Liberal Party here, which has been the sort of dominant party at the federal level for 40 or more years, and has all of the sort of old rot that you would expect from a habitual state, a habitual wielder of state power.
They, you know, there's this Quebec thing in here where we have this sort of French-speaking or sort of gutter French-speaking province that keeps wanting to Separate from the country, right?
Because they are, you know, old bigots, right?
Basically, I mean, I lived in Quebec for four years when I was an undergraduate.
I also went to the National Theatre School for two years and I went to McGill to finish my undergraduate for two years.
Sorry, that doesn't make much sense.
I started doing an English Literature degree and I started acting and I enjoyed it and then I I started writing plays and I enjoyed it.
So I applied to the National Theatre School and I got in.
And I went for two years, but for a variety of reasons found that it just wasn't for me.
The art that they were working on, and I didn't know this consciously at the time, but the art that they were working on was such, to me, horrible gutter art.
You know, it's all these horrible dysfunctional people and their horrible dysfunctional lives.
And I just, I never clicked with it.
Later, I had an opportunity to do some speeches from a play by Luther.
Sorry, a play called Luther by John Osborne, the guy who wrote Look Back in Anger.
And I clicked with that stuff because it was intelligently written.
But a lot of the stuff that you see, of course, in movies is just like, you know, dumb people behaving badly or evil people behaving badly.
And if there are good people, then they're sort of the Hill Street Blues kind of weary, holding back the tide of evil good people.
And I've just never It never clicked with me emotionally because I guess I had a sort of grander vision of life and its possibilities.
And so I just found that the art world wasn't for me.
And of course, the art world is all well and good, but you have to spend your time with other artists.
And here in Canada, you can't survive without direct state sponsorship because people are so highly taxed that they can't consume art.
And so they have to end up, the state ends up subsidizing it.
And I just found it a sort of horrible, pretentious world where everybody's just trying to pretend that they are doing better or doing sort of doing better than they are.
And after a sort of childhood of rejection, I guess you could say, I wasn't that keen on getting involved in a field where there's so much rejection.
You know, like, 99% of the money goes to 1% of the people.
And it's also sort of struck me, just as my last tangent before we get back to voting, which we will.
It's in my mind.
I watched a film last week called Beijing Bicycle, which is a foreign film about... It's sort of a little bit like The Bicycle Thief, which is an old Italian film, where, you know, this guy, he's a bicycle courier and his bike gets stolen and, you know, he gets into this sort of
strange gang warfare because it turns out that the guy he finds his bike and then the guy who's got his bike actually bought the bike from the guy who stole it and put some money into getting a new seat and new handlebars and so it gets complex they end up having to trade it and then there's a a lot of violence and uh... so it's to me it was an interesting movie like all movies or or books that i read it starts off with to me nicely
Nicely etched details.
What I'm interested when I read a book or see a movie these days is sort of the nice details of people's lives.
I would have been perfectly happy to follow this guy's story as if he were just another bicycle courier who came in from the rural area of China, which is a big thing of course these days like all industrializations or whenever the free market gets a hold of people.
It always draws them out of the country and gets them to the city because country life just sucks like a vacuum.
And so I would have been perfectly happy to see this guy's little adventures of just sort of getting his feet up, simply because it's anthropologically fascinating to me to watch a life that's very different from your own and what makes it tick.
I was in China for about three weeks to do business in 2000, and I found it quite a fascinating culture.
And so I would have been perfectly happy with the little details of this guy's life, but of course everybody feels that you need more drama.
And so they end up getting him into huge fights and chases and all this kind of...
And to me it's just silly, right?
I mean, you don't really see that stuff a whole lot.
Maybe it goes on a lot in China.
I don't know.
But if it did, then they probably would have found even more drama to throw at it.
And I find that the drama of people making challenging choices in a pretty corrupt situation is drama enough for me because that's actually... Okay, one more tangent.
Just one, really.
Indulge me this morning.
I think I'll try and tie it all together with a big bow later.
My wife and I have written a novel together called Public Lives, which is about a day in the life of a psychologist who works in a state-run hospital.
It is one of these novels of small details.
There's no fistfights, there's no car chases, there's no blow-ups.
What there is, is a A number of subtle but telling details about the corruption and the waste and the inefficiency and the emotional brutality that goes on, but it's all subtle, right?
It's subtle the way it is in life.
When we're children, a lot of us are subject to a lot more sort of overbearing authority, let's say, because we're helpless and we don't We don't know any better.
Well, we know in our hearts we know better, but we can't do anything about it.
But when we get older, I mean, I've never been involved in a car chase.
I've never really seen anything blow up.
I've never exchanged gunfire.
I think I've only seen one body, one dead body in my life.
And so my life is little details, all of which add up to happiness or unhappiness, right?
Life is happiness and unhappiness.
It's in the small details in the beginning of things.
And so, you know, we wrote this book with that in mind, and I kept all of my normal juicy metaphors and desire for drama, I kept all of that out of the novel.
And it's, you know, it's a very short novel, and I think it's, I sort of was, I based the idea on Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which you haven't read it.
Again, the first half is great.
The last third is religious justifications.
It's all nonsense.
But I'd just love it if a novelist could make it all the way through a book just giving me little, subtle, powerful details about someone's life because I could actually relate to that.
And so this woman in the hospital, she treats all her patients.
And all of her patients are depressed or angry or bitter or corrupt or whatever.
And, you know, the subtle part of the novel is that they are all state employees.
They're all public servants.
So, that's why the novel is called Public Lives, right?
Because everybody who works in the hospital is there, and everyone who gets treated is a civil servant, and has all of the stagnation, and frustration, and politicizing, Hostility that goes along with, you know, working for a corrupt criminal organization, so...
That's sort of the big subtlety.
And at the very end of it, she meets a libertarian guy who lays it all bare for her in a, I think, a subtle and, I think, well-written manner.
And so that's sort of the idea, you know, that she has all of these little hints during the day that are very hard to pick up on, at least consciously.
And then at the end, somebody lays the whole system bare for her.
Somebody that she thinks she's treating ends up sort of healing her.
That's the big, that's the big reversal.
So when a friend of Christina's read it, she has a live-in boyfriend.
So, her live-in boyfriend read it, and he came back, and we sort of had something to eat, and we sort of asked them what they thought of the book.
And Christina's friend actually, you know, studied English and knows her as a teacher and so on.
So we were hoping to get a lot from her, but unfortunately her boyfriend was the one who gave us almost all of his opinions, and like Most people, other than me, who want to give you a lot of their opinions, they're not very well thought out.
So what he said was, you know, it needs to be more like, you know, it needs to be more like Silkwood.
You know, it needs to be more dramatic.
It needs to be more like Ellen Brockovich, where people are dying.
It needs to be, you know, you need to pump up the drama.
And I said, oh, okay, well, that's interesting.
Well, and he said also, he said, you know, the woman, she needs to fight the corruption more.
She needs to make her stand.
She needs to get up there and do stuff.
And so I said, oh, that's interesting or whatever, right?
And then a few minutes later, and I sort of had this in my head as a, not as a gotcha, but just as a sort of help me understand thing.
I asked him if he'd ever been, at his work, exposed to anybody who, you know, was doing something wrong, who was doing the wrong thing, sort of in a basic sense.
And so, for instance, one of the therapists in the novel is an alcoholic.
Which, you know, is not as uncommon as you might hope and pray, right?
And he said, oh yeah, one of the guys at the plant, he used to come down and he was a drinker and we used to have to cover for him and all this and that, right?
And I said, well, I assume he was around some sort of dangerous machinery, right?
And he sort of, yeah, you know, and haha, kind of cool, you know, we used to keep our third eye on the back of our heads to see if this guy was barreling down on us with a forklift and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
He worked there for a couple of years while this guy was working at a factory and then he either left or retired or something like that.
And I said, well, help me understand because, you know, I don't mean this in any critical way, but I really just want to understand the connection, right?
Because you're saying that this woman in the novel that Christina and I wrote should take a real stand More of a stand against this colleague who's drunk, right?
The woman in the novel does go and report it and has an excruciating interview with the woman who runs the sort of employee services, health and safety services there.
And, you know, in the real world, of course, nothing happens.
But I said, you know, so, you know, this woman in the novel, she does act to do something about it, but you don't feel that it's dramatic enough or she should take a really dramatic stand or, you know, some sort of public yelling confrontation or whatever.
And I said, but help me understand why you feel that that should happen in a book, but in your life, you didn't lift a finger to report or deal with this drunken colleague that you had.
And, you know, of course he turns kind of red because he's caught, right?
And he gets a little hostile and I have to sort of manage that situation.
And I wasn't really trying to get him.
I mean, I was genuinely curious.
What would it mean to read a book wherein someone takes a stand against an alcoholic colleague and feel absolutely no connection with your own actions?
I mean, because that's sort of the point of trying to write a novel like this.
The novel that I wrote before this Well, okay, I wrote a novel before this that was sort of like the discovery of a new island that turns into a libertarian society, but that's going to take a while to finish.
But the novel I wrote before that was this sort of trilogy where it's sort of two brothers from 1916 to 1940.
And one of them works for the foreign office and joins the appeasers, and the other one becomes a fighter pilot.
You know, it's the two hostilities of two brothers which I know a little bit about, and that was, it's a huge novel.
I mean, it's grand and it's, you know, it's got Churchill and Deladier and von Ribbentrop and all the biggies from the, they're all in the novel, right?
Because I'm trying to trace as much as possible the causes of World War II.
So it's a big ambitious project, and I really liked the idea of working on a sort of detailed piece with Christina, but I was sort of shocked a little bit that this guy would be so unconnected to any of his own moral choices that he would sort of say, you know, like have the complete opposite morals for a character in a book than he would for himself.
So this character in the book, Sophia her name is, which is I think Greek for wisdom.
That's why we chose it.
So this Sophia in the novel Christina and I wrote, Public Lives, does take a stand.
And this guy says she should take more of a stand.
It should be more dramatic.
And yet, You know, within two minutes, he's sort of laughing and telling me about, haha, this guy was so drunk where I worked, and we used to have to cover for him.
I just sort of found that fascinating, and I think that that's the result.
Now, it's the result of a lot of things, but at one level it's the result of art, modern art, failing to connect with people morally.
So you get a lot of this sort of ethics of emergencies, right?
Like there's a show house on television where, you know, it's always the same kind of show, right?
They can't figure it out.
And then it turns out, you know, one treatment is going to kill the guy.
The other one is going to save the guy.
And the only way they'll know which is the right treatment is whether they kill him or saving, you know, dun-dun-dun.
It's all so dramatic.
And I mean, I think it's a fine show and it is about a sort of misogynistic rationalist.
And I think the rationalist part is interesting.
I think the misogynistic part is not.
But he is acerbic, right?
I mean, you can't speak the truth unless you're bitter in most modern movies, right?
In most modern dramas.
But so there's that sort of stuff where, you know, it's melodramatic.
And it's melodramatic not because those things don't happen, but because that's not what morality is all about.
In my view, you know, please accept my humble area here simply because I believe that morality is about the little choices that we make every day.
If I'm angry at someone, do I blow up and yell at them, or do I restrain myself and take a break and deal with them rationally?
Unless they're yelling at me, I don't think it's the right thing to do.
You know, if there's a colleague at work who is abusive, what do I do about it?
If I have an employee at work who's abusive, what do I do about it?
If I see that the business is doing something that's corrupt, you know, if they're falsifying something or, you know, exaggerating something, then what do I do?
In my relationship with my wife and how I'm gonna raise my kids.
All of these little... This is sort of in my relationship with my family.
You know, do I accept bad behavior?
Do I accept things that I know to be against what is the truth or against what I value?
Those little decisions are what morality is for.
They're not, you know, for the big life and death choices which, you know, one in a thousand or one in a million people are actually going to ever face in their life.
And And those life-and-death choices are often the result of failing to be moral.
Okay, I'm gonna give up on the voting thing, I'll just be completely honest, because I want to sort of follow this route to the end and I only have about another 10 minutes till I get to work.
So, if you look at the science of nutrition and exercise and so on, the science of prevention of medical problems, if you make those little decisions every day, you know, like I don't have the second piece of chocolate cake, and I don't eat the whole bag of chips, and I get off the couch, and I go for a walk, or I go to the gym, and I eat my greens, and, you know, whatever, and I weigh myself, right?
So, I sort of measure whether or not I'm getting chunkier with age.
Or just chunkier.
Those little decisions are what results in your health like 10 or 20 years down the road.
So, you know, if you don't do those things, and I'm not saying this is true for everyone, but in general, right?
If you don't do these things, then maybe you're 50 and you have a heart attack.
So, the heart attack is very dramatic.
But the heart attack is only dramatic because lots of little decisions have been made for 20 years that result in a heart attack.
Right?
If you make different decisions for 20 years, and I don't mean consistently, I mean, I have a weakness for chocolate and, you know, I have no aversion to an ice cookie after lunch, but if you make those decisions... If you make those decisions differently for 20 years, then, lo and behold, you end up with no heart attack and there's no drama.
I mean, you just go... That day that you would have had a heart attack if you'd lived something different, there's no drama.
Now, if you end up with a situation wherein you have to make life-and-death decisions and it's not just, you know, purely medical and so on, then, you know, quite often that's the result of sort of a lot of smaller bad decisions that you've made beforehand.
You know, so if you end up having an affair, you have this big moral dilemma, either I tell my wife or you, you know, That, or my husband, then that's of course the result of lots of little decisions.
You don't end up just having an affair, right?
I mean, I've not had any body, even remotely, any woman has remotely come on to me since I've got married because I'm just so obviously happily married and can't do anything but talk about how wonderful my wife is.
But, you know, if you are not happily married, then that's the result of bad decisions you made earlier in life.
Right, maybe you are a newer teenager, you were attracted to women who weren't that great for you or weren't that great in general, but you didn't decide to get counseling or you didn't decide to explore yourself, to know yourself, to figure out your past and what led you there.
And so you kind of just keep dating the wrong people and then you get married to the wrong woman and you have a bad marriage so you end up with a With a divorce, you know, with an affair and maybe a divorce and then you've got all this drama with your ex-wife and, you know, she's taking the kids to Guatemala or, you know, making it difficult or, you know, there's problems and she's always wants more money and, you know, so you end up with this life of continual drama and, you know, continual moral choices that are horrible, right?
So, let's say, for instance, that your wife, your ex-wife is teaching your kids morals that you don't believe in, right?
One of which may be that you're the worst guy in the universe but others which may be, you know, socialism or Or, you know, some sort of religious teachings, or spiritualism, or mysticism, irrationalism, you know, whatever, right?
Well, you've got these moral choices, you know, and they're big, complicated, ugly moral choices around, you know, what do you teach your kids, how do you teach your kids about the truth without, you know, ending back up in court with your ex-wife, and, you know, these are all difficult, complicated moral decisions, but they result from a large number of years wherein you've made bad decisions, right?
you know, like a friend of mine whose marriage was obviously bad, you know, decided to have a second kid.
Well, so now he's stuck with the marriage.
There's a lot of drama.
He's still got the should I stay or should I go syndrome.
And all of this is, you know, tortured and dramatic and so on.
And now, of course, if he does leave, he's got two kids and alimony and he'll never have another family and it's all become... But, I mean, these are all the result of a large number of decisions, right?
Deciding not to listen to his friends who said she might not be the one for you.
Deciding not to listen to his friends when they said don't have another kid with her to get things worked out.
You know, just not listening to people and then you end up with all this drama.
And that, I think, is a very important aspect of morality.
that when it comes time to the big life or death, you know, juicy dramas, right?
Then the question is, what are all the little decisions that you've made beforehand?
And there are, this is true in the state sense as well.
Like when the current state financially collapses, there's going to be a lot of drama in the world, right?
There's really going to be a lot of drama and panic and life-and-death decisions.
And, you know, it's similar to if a draft ever gets instituted, there's going to be lots of drama and life-and-death decisions.
And those are going to be absolutely horrible, right?
Do I leave my family and my home and flee to some country where I'm not going to get extradited and where I don't have to go to war?
Those are horrible decisions.
But sort of collectively as a society, They have resulted from, you know, a hundred years of bad decisions, and bad decisions in particular being not being honest with ourself about the growth of government power and doing what we could to stop it, right?
I mean, government power is entirely rests upon the argument for morality, so do I have the courage to speak about the moral truth of You know, state violence, and take away its moral legitimacy, which is, eventually, it's going to cause it to collapse, right?
I mean, or at least, if it doesn't cause it to collapse, when it does collapse, everybody will know that it collapsed because it was violent and evil, and it didn't collapse because, you know, people aren't nice enough to make socialism work.
So, those kinds of drama comes from those kinds of results.
The draft, right, comes from, you know, did you oppose the war?
Did you speak out vociferously against a war?
You know, did you...
sort of try to understand the nature of war.
You know, as a citizen who's got access to lots of information and in a situation where the state is getting more and more violent and aggressive, you know, you kind of owe it to yourself and to the truth and to your children to, you know, take a stand, right?
And it doesn't mean, you know, marching down Main Street with, you know, banners and it doesn't mean, you know, but whatever it is, in conversations with people, you never know how the truth spreads, right?
You just If you know it, then you might want to make the effort to try and spread it to whatever degree you can, the way you don't end up being sort of really lonely and bitter and not being able to... It's a balancing act, right?
If you alienate everyone because you're just hammering the truth at them, then you don't get to speak the truth to anyone unless you have sort of the facility to do a podcast like I do.
But if you don't talk to anyone about the truth, then you might as well be alone and isolated and you haven't really gained anything.
So I think that the failure in In movies, and in art, and books, and so on, is that nobody talks about the little decisions at the beginnings of things, right?
Morality is all about the little decisions at the beginning of things, when you really do have a choice, when you are choosing.
And that, to me, is kind of anti-moral.
I mean if all you're doing is saying that morality are these impossible life-and-death decisions like who is who you're gonna throw off the rowboat because it's gonna sink and you don't have enough food for everyone so who are you going to make die and you have to choose between one of your children who's going to die and I mean that stuff to me is completely anti-moral because that's really not what morality is about when you're in those kind of compulsory situations it doesn't really matter what you may or may not want to do.
I mean, by the time you're sort of Sophie and choosing between your children in a death camp, morality is impossible, right?
It's like saying that nutrition is, you know, is important during a heart attack.
Well, it's not.
Nutrition is important in preventing a heart attack.
Exercise is important in preventing a heart attack.
Once you're already there, then you're just in sort of brute animal reaction mode, and it doesn't really matter what you choose, because your choices, you wouldn't choose to be in that situation.
So your choices after that are sort of irrelevant.
So, I mean, I know that's a complicated topic, which we can get into another time, but, you know, the thing I would really try and help you focus on is, you know, next time you see a movie or read a book, look at the moral choices that are presented and see if it's not really sort of subtly anti-morality by placing morality in In the category of a series of impossible choices, none of which are going to make you happy, which is not very complimentary towards morality.
And I think that's something that's a real rot at the core of modern art, as you'd expect, right?
I mean, art comes out of philosophy in the sort of second generation of things.
And, you know, because the philosophy is corrupt and false, the art is going to be anti morality, anti rationality.
But it still can't escape the fact that the argument for morality is so powerful, and therefore it's going to combine the two, right?
The argument for morality combined with anti-rationality and hostility towards morality is going to produce all of these dramas wherein these impossible moral choices are put forward.
Well, I think I've actually achieved something rather remarkable here, which is a podcast composed entirely of tangents.
I mean, I guess I knew it was coming sooner or later.
They were sort of growing like a weed.
I'm still going to post this though, but thanks for making it to the end.
I promise I will try to get to... No, I don't even promise.
I will get to voting this afternoon and I hope you've enjoyed this.
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